A Simple Plan
by Meresger
Summary: What if They Who Must Not Be Named were not really who everyone thought they were? The Once-verse mashedup with the concept of The Flash multiverse sets our heroes (and villains) on a quest to save their world from fugitives whose nefarious take over of a certain TV show threatens to destroy their very existence.
1. main story

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**

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Title: A Simple Plan

Disclaimer: I don't own _Once Upon A Time_. If I did, Adam  & Eddy would be fired and picking up litter by the side of the highway.

Summary: What if They Who Must Not Be Named were not really who everyone thought they were? The _Once_ -verse mashedup with the concept of _The Flash_ multiverse sets our heroes (and villains) on a quest to save their world from fugitives whose nefarious take over of a certain TV show threatens to destroy their very existence.

Genre: Humor and parody.

Author's Note #1: This story does not _technically_ include "real people" which would be a violation of 's policy. While fictional characters may voice opinions on them, they are intended for bad crackfic humor and not direct personal attacks (or praise) and the individuals themselves are properly disguised from actually being themselves; think _South Park_ with Mohammed in the mascot costume.

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 **A Simple Plan**

At a large, ornate conference table in the most beautiful castle in all the lands there was gathered a unique, never-before-seen assortment of both heroes and villains, humans and non-humans, native Enchanted Forest dwellers and visiting dignitaries from distant kingdoms like Arendelle and Camelot as well as other "lands" in their magical multiverse including a delegation from Mt. Olympus to represent the "immortal" residents of The Fairy Tale Land Confederation.

Addressing the dozens of literary characters, dressed in her impeccable white corseted finery, Snow White was at her most impassioned.

"People of the Many Magical Realms, we must act swiftly and decisively! While we are often at odds on even simple issues, while some of us here might view one another as villains seeking to usurp our rightful happy endings, this is a matter which will destroy _all happy endings_. It will be the end of us all, human and animorph, mortal and immortal, and for this reason we must set aside our differences and unite. If ever there was a instance in which the saying 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' holds true, it-"

Snow White trailed off as she suddenly looked as though she was suffering a stroke. She was not the only one of the assembly affected and soon the reason became apparent in an assortment of disturbing ways.

As the Queen's flowing locks shorted to a pixie cut and her body mass grew, a good fifty pounds of weight added to her petite frame her gaze dulled to that of a slowwitted elementary school teacher who had spent too many years huffing the arts & crafts paste.

In a nearby chair Snow White's sometimes nemesis Regina "Mills" suddenly split into two versions of herself, one with a Farrah Fawcett flip and power suit the other with a bosom and backside increased from normal proportions to something more fitting for a Sir Mix-a-Lot music video, and her hyper-psycho Evil Queen twin began trying to strangle her to death.

While Regina was preoccupied trying to survive her insane duplicate, in the seat beside her, her adoptive son Henry who was supposed to be a slight boy of eleven began to morph painfully into a sixteen year old boy, his pained groans also ignored by his biological mother Emma Swan who had regressed into the mental and emotional state of a teenage girl as her fairy tale lands clothes were replaced with jeans and a red jacket and with a breath cry of, "Killian! I've missed you!" she physically threw herself across the large table to make-out with Captain Hook.

The pirate, who had started crying without reason moments earlier at the same time his beloved pirate outfit was replaced by skinny jeans and cheap faux-leather vest had his chair propelled backward to the floor as Emma cried in triumph, "Ha! Now I have you on _your back_! It's time for that fun activity you promised! Ravish me here and now!"

Hook growled like the suddenly horny animal he was - although, to be fair, he was generally at least partially randy - and flipped the accommodating princess on her back, fumbling with the button fly of her jeans while spouting poetic nonsense.

No one seemed to find this problematic. Prince Charming was too busy comparing sword sizes with King Arthur and Snow actually started chanting, "Make me a grand baby! Make me a grand baby!" while Maleficent was weeping over her daughter being painfully transformed into a freakishly tall, big-boned white woman with a bad dye job, colored contacts, and permanently broken moral compass.

"I'm so empty inside!" Lily wailed, rocking back and forth in a corner. "I've never been happy!"

"Fill me up inside!" Emma was demanding of Hook. "I need your darkness to compensate for my lack of darkness!"

"Weren't you just the Dark One, luv?"

"Shut up and fuck me, Killian like we're at Robin Hood's funeral and his coffin is right there! That's so hot!"

Then Henry, fully transformed into a horny teenager, bounded from his chair to physically accost one of the Camelot delegate's daughters, not that Lady Violet seemed to mind, even as her mother began fading in and out of existence a few feet away.

At last, the girl's father yanked Henry off shouting, "I WILL NOT HAVE MY DAUGHTER COURTED BY SOME EDUCATED BOOK-LOVER! SHE WILL MARRY A SLOWWITTED KNIGHT WITH A BOUFFANT WHO KILLS DRAGONS AND THEY WILL CONSUMMATE THEIR MARRIAGE ON A FIELD OF RARE HYBRID CHIVE-ROSES CALLED MIDDLEMISTS THAT ARE SOMEHOW KNOWN WELL ENOUGH IN A LAND FAR ACROSS THE OCEAN TO BE THEIR NAME FOR OUR CONTINENT AND WHICH WERE CREATED BY THE FIRST DARK ONE USING DARK MAGIC THAT MORTALS NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAD ACCESS TO AND YET ARE SOMEHOW THE ULTIMATE SYMBOL OF TRUE LOVE AND DEVOTION EVEN THOUGH OUR KING ALSO USED THEM TO SEDUCE THE WOMAN HE MIND-WIPED WITH MAGIC AND MARTIALLY RAPED FOR BETWEEN FIVE AND FIFTY YEARS, BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT MATTERS IN CAMELOT!"

While this rant was disturbing, particularly when compounded by King Arthur having transformed into a weaselly-looking fellow who was spouting racist propaganda while having his metaphorical dick contest with Prince Charming, the most troubling thing at the table was a number of individuals who began to fade away like Violet's mother, including Henry's father Neal/Baelfire, Robin Hood, Marian, Merlin, and Snow White's sweet lady's maid Johanna who had been refilling mead cups until the tray fell through her ghostly hands.

The anomaly lasted for several minutes before everyone reverted to their normal selves, the physically transformed groaning from the painful process while the mentally and emotionally altered looked around in disgust.

While Henry and Regina nursed injuries from their attackers and King Arthur averted his eyes from all of the people of color at the table, including his wife - who had been making out with Lancelot so she was looking away as well - Emma made a walk-of-shame back to her seat and took a swallow and spit of her mead while Hook gulped rum, touched up his guyliner and glared at anyone who laughed about his sudden emo trip and trying to shag his great grand daughter... what with his having sired her grandmother Eva during a supply run and the babe having been brokered into adopted by Rumpelstiltskin - not Rumplestiltskin, an unforgivable misspelling of the Dark One's name by dumbshit prop interns - to a low level royal family who couldn't have children due to one of those pesky infertility potions and that being before the Siren took up residence at Lake Nostos and the combined lust magic of her horny dead victims created a cure... even if all the babies conceived with the help of the tonic, like Emma, turned out a bit... wrong in the head.

Red similarly threw an apologetic look at her current girlfriend Tinkerbell after having dry-humped Dorothy who reclapsed hands with Lily, once more back to her not-giant-of-a-white-woman-with-a-dye-job self. Lancelot returned to his chair apart from the Camelot delegation beside Merida whose insane red clown hair and bording-on-ethnographically-insulting-over-done Scottish accent had both vanished, leaving her once more looking and sounding like a normal person instead of a _Robot Chicken_ character.

While Emma checked to make sure Neal had fully recorporealized and all of his gray hair had vanished, Snow had to shake cobwebs from her head, focusing to regain her mental acumen from her temporarily slowwitted transformation, and then continued, "As you all know, as we have just experienced, these 'changes' are getting more frequent and more complete. Rumpelstiltskin predicts that within three months they will become permanent. We will forget ourselves. Our very history will be altered in such a way that compounding paradoxes will result in the our multiverse magical worlds being torn apart. We will cease to exist."

"Tis true, Even the Gods and Mt. Olympus will not be immune," said Zeus, who was not a 90 pound weakling pussy anymore and had set aside his differences with Hades to accompany his brother, who wasn't technically a 'bad guy' by general standards, just not nearly murdery, rapey, or incesty enough to qualify for permanent Mt. Olympus residence even if he had banged his own niece, which Zeus had been totally cool with and tried to silence her annoying baby mama on the matter to keep his sister/wife from finding out.

"Even our Afterlife realms will be destroyed," amended Hades. "There will be no Underworld and no place to move onto either. We will all simple cease to be as though this bullshit representation of The Olympian Crystal has annihilated our souls from existence. Even though gods and mortals have rarely had agreeable interactions, in this we must all unite."

"Agreed," nodded Cruella deVil. "I may be a villain, but I value my existence over some rogue hacks absconding with our magical quill to become rich and famous on a parallel Earth by giving me some disgusting power of stinky magical breath. Also, I may be a villain, but I am certainly not a certifiably insane serial killer like Hyde here."

"It's not my fault," Hyde growled, "that those two imbeciles decided to use that magical mash-up spell they created to kill off Nealfrie to merge me with my brother in order to split the Evil Queen in two while creating some dumbass steampunk fetish world that does not exist. I have important work to do in my lab with Viktor, but every other day I am transported to this insane world they cooked up. Last week I was nearly run through by Don Quixote when he got ripped out of his world in the middle of a jousting match!"

"It hurts so much!" Mulan burst out in tears. "You think you all have it bad being transported between worlds? _They ripped me out of Heaven!_ I'm a real person. A REAL PERSON! I don't belong here!"

"Aye, I empathize, lass," nodded Edward Teech, the other historical and long dead figure dragged into this mess. The pirate was one of the most feared men in history who'd held to some superstition and used some magic brought to Earth from worlds like this, but even he would not have meddled with a device that could pull the dead out of Heaven... or Hell. "Hell is better than this. Because of those two assholes who've bound us to their bloody show, our souls are barred from passing on back to where we belong, our histories and very identifies being warped into an utter sham! I am a dangerous, bloodthirsty, cunning pirate, damn it, not a witless fool who got knocked overboard by a one-handed drunk!"

"Oye!" Hook howled, "my alcoholism was not nearly this pronounced until they started meddling! And I certainly have at least enough honor not to shag my stepson's woman, kin or not... though the kin part makes this thoroughly disgusting! It may be all the rage in Mt. Olympus, but I consider incest a major turnoff!"

"I want to take a shower from the inside out," shuddered Emma and nearly burst into tears at how her life had been ruined. Besides the horror of feeling sexual and romantic feelings for her great grandfather, she'd contracted syphilis from Hook and there was no cure in this world so she couldn't even kiss Neal now. People in the kingdom had started calling her "The Skank Swan", which was just so mean and unfair when she couldn't help it!

"Anyway, I'd rather me head by lopped off again and me body thrown into the sea than endure any longer this purgatory of an unnatural existence!" concluded Blackbeard. "I long for the sweet release of returning to Hell!"

"I just want to be a competent person with clearly defined morality," sighed Robin Hood, "who wouldn't sleep with his wife's murderer beside her comatose body and then betray his skanky mistress out of misplaced obligation to stay with her sister who raped him!"

"Also," interjected Marian, "it would be nice if were both not killed to further this... disgusting hot mess," she gestured between Emma and Hook. "Plus, it's quite obvious these two fiends are racist bastards on top of being misogynist fucks who will wipe out all of the people of color of this world before the ultimate doomsday result."

Everyone nodded in agreement on these points.

"It does seem that way," complained Ingrid. "Our world was not perfect, but being raped or sexually assaulted is certainly not the catalyst for women of this world to turn evil, and to have that juxtaposed with these rapist men being glorified heroes? No offense, Hook, but you are disgusting!"

"Well, they made my raping Robin a hilarious prank," pointed out Zelena. "Of course, that didn't actually happen. Why would any master villain come up with a revenge plan against her sister to take her man without her knowing it was her and then live in poverty in a one bedroom apartment having to take care of two ungrateful brats? Also, using brains, hearts, courage, and baby sacrifice to open a time portal? That's absurd! I just want to send that bratty bisexual bint Dorothy back to Kansas for good and rule Oz with Hades after our long and beautiful romance that has now been reduced to a creepy bike ride through the woods and some stupid baby that keeps appearing and I have no idea how to care for it and have no attachment to the stupid thing when my apparent pregnancy lasted all of a week because the Derp Swan gave me magic onion rings!"

"Which wasn't my fault!" Emma huffed. "You know _none_ of that happen! When I became the Dark One it was a completely different situation."

"And it's getting harder and harder to remember that!" complained Zelena. "Half the time now I think I did murder Nealfire over there, but then I think, well, no one seems to give a fuck about that and I'm a hero now, so that can't be right..."

"They are such hacks," grumbled Hades. "We cannot let this go on. The end of everything or not, it's humiliating! I am going to be wiped out of existence by their made-up plot device that I fixed to _rule a town in Maine_ instead of defeat my hated brother, that, really I don't hate enough to want to kill, I just disagree with him fucking our sister and trying to trick me into marrying his daughter, because this douche and Hera make those weirdoes on _Game of Thrones_ look healthy."

"That is such a good show," said Granny.

"It really is," agreed Belle.

"I hear they are deviating from the books now," piped up the Woodcutter.

"Which is the crux of our problem," stated .Rumpelstiltskin. "This two nerdowells have appointed themselves the Authors of our multiverse and by their absconding of that magical quill from Merlin's Keep, they are altering the very fabric of our existence to fit their fickle whims and wet the panties of these so-called 'fangirls' and that dimwitted devotion only increases their powers of persuasion and retconning our history and identity and the very laws of magic until we reach a tipping point when every realm in the multiverse is destroyed and only Earth-1 remains. We have to stop them!"

"Obviously," agreed Charming. "Though what about that impostor who's pretending to be that billionaire bafoon he killed and locked in his gilded tower basement?"

"Well, that doesn't effect the very fabric of our existence," said The Blue Fairy. "The worst he can do is destroy humanity on Earth-1 in a nuclear holocaust after he insults some world leader on Twitter. That is not our Earth. It is unfortunate that these two idiots created a breach accessible by other lunatics from Earth-2, the Evil Twin world, after discovering us in Storybrooke on Earth-3."

"I have a question," asked Robin. "Why is our Earth called Earth-3? Shouldn't _we_ call it Earth-1?"

"Long ago," Merlin explained, "I mapped out the temporal and special connectivity of the multiverse. Earth-1 is the universe at the nexus of this multiverse cluster. It is the one that is truly a Land without Magic and has no directly connected magical realms, save for what is brought there from other Earths or bound to it by the creation of breeches such as these two criminals have done. Because of the connections they have created these changes are happening and when the level of paradoxes becomes unsustainable even by the malleability of magic, existence will be destroyed, save for Earth-1."

"Are they aware of this?" asked Aurora.

"Who the hell knows?" scoffed Cinderella. "They can't remember the age and gender of my baby!"

"Whether they know or not they must be stopped," declared Emma. "I will not see everything I sort of fought for that was mostly Henry's doing," she admitted, "but destroyed and all of us turned into amoral, unrepentant sluts before we're star dust."

"Here here! It's clear that we have to act," spoke up Ursula, her tentacles writhing behind her. "I will not be permanently 'rewritten' from a badass goddess into a fucking _night janitor_ to prop up Captain Rapist over there."

"You think that's bad, honey?" scoffed Regina. "I'm being turned into _that_ monstrosity's half sister!"

Zelena glared. "Like I want to be related to _you_. And even if I was, I certainly wouldn't become your BFF just because our psychotic mother revealed we had a sleepover once when you were ten. I would much rather claim my own worthless family than be part of yours!"

"We don't want you!" Merida declared. "That's why we dropped your skank ass in Oz when you tried to poison me when I was two!"

Zelena scoffed. "Yes, well, I'm smarter than you and I have a more cultured accent and I married a god, so I win anyway. And your mother was a bear. Like literally cursed into being a bear and some hunter shot her."

"Bitch."

"Whore."

"Both of you shut up!" Charming interjected. "Your both intolerably annoying and that's enough proof that you're siblings, which is irrelevant to this situation. But on the subject of siblings, I refuse to feel guilty about some made up bullshit that my brother was a villain because he was jealous of me or that I threw his already dead self in some estuary of eternal damnation while my magically powerful daughter quivered like a stupid cliche damsel clinging to that manwhore pirate over there who gave her syphilis!"

"By accident, mate! She's my kin! You think I want to tap that? I'm not like these god freaks over here!"

"We are super freaky," conceeded Zeus and he and Hades high-fived. "One time," he amended. "You are still the loser brother that no one likes."

"Yeah, well, I'm not fucking my own sister."

"Exactly my point."

"And mine," said Hook with a shake of his head. "Only a super freak like that would give _me_ a second chance at life!"

"I wouldn't actually. I would damn you to eternal Hell for being nastier than I am. No one is nastier than I am," said Zeus. "And that is why these two douchebags must be stopped. They usurping the authority of the gods to be supreme in our incestuous fuckery and decide the fates of you all when you perish based our unaltered free will and that scale thingie Hades has before they tampered with it to make it a Trial of True Love's Push, whatever the fuck _that_ is."

Everyone nodded in agreement that it made no sense.

"Also, they turned my bastard half-human son into a total pussy. I will not stand for that!"

"I must admit I don't like the thought that I was in love with some washed-up wussy version of Hercules because of yet another spoiled and idiotic childhood crisis those nitwits want to put me through to make me utterly unlikeable and with the IQ of one of Ursula's goldfish," agreed Snow White.

"Well, it could be worse. You weren't turne dinto the son of a pubescent child molester," said Rumpelstiltskin while glaring at Peter Pan whom he _would_ have killed if time hadn't been standing still and trapped them in an increasing loop of paradoxes.

"That feeling is mutual, _laddy_ ," scoffed Pan. "I had a good thing going. You think I've liked being transformed into an old geezer? I may be evil but I'm no one's father. And now Neverland is dying and by these new laws I am supposed to rip out Golden Boy's heart to fix it but as it is neither magically nor physically possible to use the heart of another person while your own heart still exists any more than one can split a heart and shove half of it into a spirit being, I would rather grow up and marry Felix than suffer the agony of that paradox again!"

"I think it's settled then," nodded Charming while pounding on the tabletop. "We have to act and act quickly for all of our sakes. It's horrible enough that our worlds will end, but we will lose ourselves to this... television show before that happens. We will not even have the dignity of dying with our faculties, our true personalities, or in some cases even our true appearances."

"But what can we do to stop it?" asked Maleficent. "We don't even know how those two hacks managed to create a breach to Earth-1 which should not be directly accessible from Earth-3."

"Actually, we do and they didn't do it directly," announced Belle who was no longer throwing up from her non-existent unborn baby. "They made use of a syzygy. The harmonics, the frequency at which our worlds vibrate occasionally overlap and they were able to use one of these in 2012 to travel from Earth-2 to Earth-3, where we were trapped in Storybrooke for twenty-eight years. Jefferson was able to track them to Earth-1, also known as The Land without Magic, before they wrote his hat out of existence and he became trapped. It was then they rewrote the original final episodes using The Quill to have Emma break the Dark Curse and thus begin affecting our lives here."

"Wait, so we have to rescue The Mad Hatter as well?" asked Jaffar who was there with the Wonderland delegation.

"Figures," grumbled Will Scarlet.

"I just want to kick their asses for killing me, bringing me back, marrying me to my true love and then turning him into the Bookworm's fuckboytoy for no reason!" complained Anastasia.

"You and me both, dearie," said Rumpelstiltskin.

"There will be another syzygy in July," announced The Blue Fairy. "Or July on Earth-1 since time has ceased to pass here in our accursed state and it is also not usually aligned to the day between Earths. We will send a small party through the portal created with The Apprentice's wand to the Earth-3 wishing well, which still has some residual magic connecting our worlds from Storybrooke's destruction. From there it will be possible to reach Earth-2 using this new penny fountain nonsense magic."

"And Earth-1?" asked Hook. "Even The Crocodile couldn't get there with his super powerful curse."

"Because _someone_ ," he glared at Regina, "tried to sacrifice her horse and fucked it all up!"

"You should have been more specific!"

"Anyway," Belle continued, "we should be able to use the Earth-2 technology we took from Tamara to locate and open the breach they created to reach Earth-1. There will be a window of forty-eight hours to accomplish our mission before the alignment ends and the next one won't be until twenty-twenty-one."

"Who will go?" asked Merida.

"By their warped magic rules," said Snow White, "only those bound by the magic of 'series regulars' will be able to go and return. As you have probably all noticed, we suffer the worst of this debilitating magical curse, though soon we will all be beyond help."

"What about past series regulars?" asked Jiminy Cricket who was relieved to be a cricket again and not a grasshopper with a boob fetish.

"Or recently killed off ones?" asked Robin. "I want a piece of those arsehats for what they did to me! You can't imagine what it's like to just _be nothing_ and be able _to remember it_! That has to be at least as bad as Mulan getting ripped out of Heaven."

"Hey, at least you don't go into a fugue state where you're totally cool watching the mother of your child and true love declare undying love to your deadbeat stepfather like two months after you kicked it," Neal pointed out. "My wife is being reduced to that stupid chick from _Twilight_ who was now apparently a complete loser her entire life until she decided to impersonate a woman she got killed to stay out prison!"

"I'm a badass with morals who got my GED and made something of myself," sniffed Emma. "I want my son to be proud of me."

"I am proud of you, Mom," Henry told her. "At least when you're not trying to have sex with Hook and I'm not a rebellious teenager who hates everyone and thinks magic is evil one minute and amazing the next... and if I ever start making speeches about believing in magic and rainbows and unicorn stickers on the castle's front steps, _just kill me_ before I die of humiliation!"

"I think we'd all rather be dead than transformed into these nonsensical caricatures," sighed Rumpelstiltskin.

* * *

On a hot day in July the 'Away Team' made a harrowing escape from Earth-2 and landed on Earth-1 on the beach in San Diego, California.

They had decided the current 'series regulars' would infiltrate and replace their quasi-dopplegangers whom they more-and-more resembled with each magical incident while past ones who had enough residual connection to the Magic Quill would act as lookouts... and to try and find the Magic Quill so they could get home, unwrite this mess, and then break the damned thing so this could never happen again!

"I suddenly really want sushi," said Emma who had used a burner phone to troll Twitter and find out what this 'Jennifer Morrison' was wearing to more easily use her decade-long bountyhunter skills to take her out... before she forgot and thought she was a bountyhunter for only two years and that the look she'd spent years perfecting was basically a dead woman's stolen identity.

"Hmm, me too," said Hook.

"Me three," said Neal and he showed them an Instagram picture of the people pretending to be badly written versions of them eating sushi several years ago.

"Why are you wearing that stupid hat?" asked David.

"Forget about that," interrupted Rumpelstiltskin. "The mission! We must blend in."

"That shouldn't be hard," scoffed Regina as they passed people in costumes and some girl called out:

" _Sweet Evil Queen costume! SwanQueen forever!"_

"What the hell is 'SwanQueen'?" she grumbled.

Henry googled it and reported, "They want you and mom and to be my two mommies in a romantic way."

Regina scoffed. "She's my step granddaughter."

"Who tried to murder me and my entire family," scoffed Emma right back. "And isn't remotely remorseful about it, either!"

"Well, I'd rather be honestly not remorseful about it then the half-ass redemption bullshit story I've been given falling in love because of pixie dust and a tramp stamp with the man whose wife I killed, but then didn't kill because my sister killed him because you fell down an impossible time portal trying to find a quiet place to play fuck-the-pirate."

"Language!" Emma hissed, covering Henry's ears.

Henry shrugged her off. "I've been routinely fourteen for months now. I have memories of living in New York and watching girls change in the locker room through a hole in the wall that's really out of character for me, but I think it was part of my off-screen transition to becoming a creepy little shit who'd be totally cool with helping Captain Rapist buy a house to bang you in."

Every grimaced as it was just not natural for an eleven-year-old boy to be talking like that.

"We shouldn't have brought Henry," growled Regina. "This is the sort of bad parenting bullshit those quacks had us implement dragging him to The Underworld."

"Henry has the Heart of the Truest Believer," Rumpelstiltskin reminded. "We need his innate magic to get home. Remember, the only magic in this world is that which have brought with us. Even Emma cannot do wild magic here the way she could on Earth-3. And we certainly cannot wish our selves home through a fountain from here."

"Wow!" she teenage girls squealed as they entered the convention center. "Are you guys with Once Upon A Rock Opera?"

"Um... sure," said Belle.

"Can we get a selfie?" asked one.

"And you guys pretend to make out!?" the other asked Emma and Hook who both emphatically stated, "NO!"

After the selfie taking the girls scampered off tittering about how they knew from Twitter that Colin hadn't brought his wife to San Diego which totally had to mean he was having sex with 'JMo' right now and she was totally pregnant from 'that dress'.

"Good Christ, these dumbshit little girls who clearly cannot separate reality from fiction are hastening the demise of our existence by turning our reality into bad fanfiction?" scoffed Regina.

"Sadly it would seem so," said a now human Jiminy. "The power of persuasion works especially well on teenagers. It's only natural that our nemeses would have tossed aside their predecessors intelligent adult audience for easily manipulated, shallow-minded little twits after killing their dopplegangers and assuming their identities."

"It's really a wonder no one noticed the drastic change," mused Neal as he reviewed the information on his phone. "I mean 'Adam' suddenly started putting on a shit-ton of weight and gushing about how a show that glorifies rape and incest is something he wants his daughters to aspire toward while 'Eddy' turned into a creepy little shit with an unabashed man-crush that 'Adam' has to practically bash over the head to keep his mouth shut from spilling all their amazingly genius story ideas. I swear, that guy is masturbating under the panel table."

"Plus the racism and homophobia and abrupt change from being all about female empowerment to 1960's misogyny in which a woman's happy ending is making everything about a man and having his babies," Emma pointed out. "Speaking of which, not that I've been thinking about it a lot and not to undermine my point, but it really sucks that we're cursed and can't have another kid."

"You want another kid?" Neal asked, surprised.

"I don't know. It's just a future possibility that crossed my mind when you answered August's postcard, before those creeps came to Storybrooke and started messing with things and dragged that mental patient Tamara from Hyde's world and the poor guy Owen into the mix to create romantic tension and we all had to use the magic beans to return to The Enchanted Forest before the breach to Earth-2 they created turned Storybrooke into an inhospitable wasteland."

She bashed Hook over the head.

"Oye, what was that for!?"

"For trying to strand us to die when you took the magic beans!"

"Well, I didn't! I had second thoughts after realizing that Neal was Baelfire and wanted to make amends, and certainly not by shagging you! Do you think I like that the one genuinely selfless and paternal emotion I've had since my beloved Milah was killed is being twisted into a MILF fetish for a woman who now never really loved me but was just using me? How can they disparage my Milah like that? Sure, she was a terrible mother and a selfish bitch, but she was my selfish bitch soulmate!"

He glared at Rumpelstiltskin. "That you killed, Crocodile!"

"Because she said she would abandon our son all over again. It had nothing to do with you, Pirate," Rumpelstiltskin growled. "And if things continue down the current path, Milah won't end up swimming in eternal torment for the paradoxical unfinished business of not asking Baelfire's forgiveness when he dies and moves on without unfinished business, but stuck with the rest of us and Robin Hood and Hades fate sooner-to-be fate of not existing at all!"

"Aye, aye, we called a truce _for now_ ," Hook conceded. "But as soon as we delight in murdering these two psychopaths, it's back on."

"Whatever," sighed Rumpelstiltskin.

"They should be done with autographs soon," Emma noted from the program. "And it looks like they have a history of going out for sushi in groups. Last time The Impostors went with them."

"We can't risk them realizing we're here until we have assumed the identities of these actors," Snow reminded. "We were no match for them in Storybrooke. We were lucky to get out with our lives. Whatever Earth-2 magic tricks they are combining with The Quill is unbeatable."

"But they will not have as much of an arsenal of magic here," Rumpelstiltskin pointed out. "The only magic they have is The Quill that alters our reality and whatever they might have abscond with from Storybrooke. Their precautionary tactics are simply the result of this world raising a generation of social-media-dumbed teenagers who considering 'sexting' for five minutes in English class an epic courtship."

"This world really is a mess. No wonder the Earth-2 crazies keep picking it to try and take over," said Belle.

"Well, it has no conjoined magical worlds like the rest in which to blow off that steam," considered Rumpelstiltskin, "so it stands to reason it would generate a population more prone to the conquest of dictators and chaos-minded fundamentalist movements. Magic always comes with a price, but so does being devoid of it."

"That was much better than the speech those asshats had me give," complained Henry.

Rumpelstiltskin patted his grandson on the shoulder. "There there, Henry. No one holds it against you. You were in a fugue state ranting to those pigeons and no one recognized you given you had freakishly aged to look like a college freshman."

"There's the sign for the autograph session," Red discovered. "We should split up. We're too conspicuous even masquerading as some rock opera troupe."

* * *

What followed was a masterful _Ocean's Eleven_ like plot of The Away Team taking down and drugging the actors who played them on TV and then assuming their identities to stalk the two fugitives who had killed their TV showrunner dopplegangers to assume _their_ identities because they couldn't get screenwriting jobs on Earth-2.

It turned out to be remarkably easy to drug their sake, load them into a panel van, and drive them to an abandoned warehouse.

As they were unloading the two 'showrunners', Henry asked, "Why are they dressed as Chewbacca with glasses and a fat Jar Jar Binks?"

"Because there are legal issues with depicting real people," explained Rumpelstiltskin.

"But they're impostors."

"We're just covering all the bases," Emma said while securing 'Black Widow' to a chair.

"You're sure we don't have to get our quasi-doubles?" asked Neal while Hook seemed to be having too much fun with 'Jack Sparrow'.

"No. Only the currently active contracts signed with The Quill have binding magic we must break," said Rumpelstiltskin.

"I almost feel bad," said Regina as she finished gagging the woman in a stolen Xena costume. "She seems like the only genuinely nice one who hasn't been mind-fucked by this twisted magic. What kind of irony is that?"

"I hope my nose doesn't _really_ get that big," sighed Henry of Spinder-Man. "I mean, he looks nothing like either of his so-called parents!"

"Let's get this over with," sighed Robin. "I'm starting to feel existential again."

"Yeah, me too," agreed Neal.

Emma used smelling salts to wake Short Chewbacca with Glasses and Fat Jar Jar Binks who immediately started to struggle.

"Not so sly now, are you?" Rumpelstiltskin hissed.

"So, you found us," sneered Short Chewbacca with Glasses.

"It wasn't hard. Your usurped identities are destroying our world and many others!" snapped Snow. "You two misogynist, murdering, rapist assholes are brainwashing impressionable teenagers into believing that your disgusting depiction of us and our world is true love and family and hope and happiness and you damn well know what that's doing to us! Not to mention you are destroying the names and images of the good men you killed!"

"Belief is a powerful thing, even in the Land without Magic," cackled Fat Jar Jar Binks, adding, "Mesa so sorry yousa gonna die!"

Hook punched him in the face. "I am not redeemed, you fat fuck! And I didn't spend three centuries in Neverland to end up your emo man baby fart in the wind! I am a fearsome pirate and a cunning villain, not some princess' weepy dildo who does nothing but pine and murder and cover up my murders! I am proud of my murdering, damn it! And I murder and rape and abuse persons of all races and sexual orientations! Stop making me look like a white supremacist poster boy! Also, my hair is turning into that horrible wig you keep putting on that balding chap who, receding hairline or not, surely deserves better than to have his livelihood reduced to being a one-hit love interest that will never get him a serious acting job because you ruined his career with your shite writing!"

"Yeah, for all of them," agreed Emma. "Do you know how many 'worst actress' votes that poor woman gets for having to deliver your shit teenage romance dialogue while suffering migraines that are probably the result of the magical mind-fucking that Quill is doing to them? It's not her fault that she's impressionable like those idiot teenage girls who want _him_ to cheat on his wife with _her_ and have ten thousand of his fanfiction babies."

"Isn't it?" shrugged Short Chewbacca with Glasses. "They all renewed their contracts. It was unfortunate that _some_ ," he glanced at those whose actors were now former regulars, "were too strong-willed to stay controlled, to buy into our storylines and characterization without questioning the illogic of it and obvious departure from the original concept to pander to those stupid little girls whose belief fuels our power. If they had been more easily manipulated, we wouldn't have to kill them off or make them token lesbians or... I don't remember what we did to either of you." he directed at Jiminy and Will, "but we'll come up with something truly terrible after this!"

"Oh, you won't get that chance!"

"Won't we?" cackled Fat Jar Jar Binks and suddenly he was free and throwing waves of magic at them.

"We searched him for magical objects!" gasped Regina while using a limited-magic-core fairy wand to block the attack.

"Not _everywhere_!" giggled the fake Gungan as he let out a fart that set the warehouse on fire.

"Of course," groaned Robin. "How my character could only have transformed his appearance with that non-existent tailsman if he it up his arse! They _would_ think of that!"

"Gross!" everyone cried.

"But effective!" declared Short Chewbacca with Glasses farting more fireballs.

"You actually keep that magic quill up your ass!?" Emma exclaimed.

"I keep the quill-" said Fat Jar Jar Binks.

"I have the ink!" giggled Short Chewbacca with Glasses.

"Huh," said Hook. "I had the skinny one pegged for liking to stick phallic-shaped things up his bum the way he was crushing on me."

"SHUT UP AND DIE, PIRATE!" bellowed Short Chewbacca with Glasses.

"But you love me!" Hook shouted back. "How can you kill what you want to have sex with?"

"You've done it dozens of times!"

"Hmm... fair point..." Hook shrugged at the others. "I've got nothing else."

"We're running out of fairy dust charge!" Belle began to panic as her wand sputtered.

"That's right!" Fat Jar Jar Binks taunted. "You're going to die, bitch! I never liked your stupid story and I jacked off every time I destroyed the 'beautiful' story my sappy dickwad of a doppleganger loved so much!"

"Don't call my wife a bitch, you arshole!" growled Rumpelstiltskin.

"At least it wasn't me who misspelled your name!"

"No, you're just try to erase me from existence!"

"What the what!?" a now conscious 'Black Widow' exclaimed to find magic and fireballs destroying an abandoned warehouse.

Emma deflected a bolt of magic with an old hubcap and told her, "It's all just a dream. You ate some bad sushi, honey."

"Oh.. okay then," the woman muttered before Emma boinked her over the head with the hubcap.

The magical battle continued for several minutes before two gunshots range out and the two impostors suddenly fell over dead and there was a rainbow-y magical glow as the bonds on everyone and their thespian doubles was shattered.

Everyone gawked at Henry who shrugged. "What? Who'd expect an eleven year old to bring a gun to magic fight? It's not like True Love's Kiss was gonna break this curse."

"Fair point," shrugged Rumpelstiltskin.

"Aye," nodded Hook. "And a fine pair of shots in the back, right through the heart. That's the way I'd do it!"

"No shit," grunted Belle.

"Wow, kid, how'd you get to be such a good shot?" Emma gasped. "And also, give me that! Guns are not for kids!"

"But I saved existence!" whined Henry who was now his little kid self again.

"And you're still grounded!" Regina snapped.

"With no desert and definitely no spending time with Violet," added Neal.

"Whatever," shrugged Henry. "Food in the Enchanted Forest sucks ass. And I like Grace anyway. I mean, Violet's like fourteen and I'm _eleven_."

"Wait... Jefferson's daughter?" asked Emma, then she remembered, "Shit, we have to find Jefferson!"

* * *

After faking a robbery gone wrong in a bad part of town in a lost Uber with an absente driver - because apparently in this world Uber drivers going psycho and murdering people was totally a legit tragic thing that happened - and returning their doubles to their hotel rooms, they set out to find Jefferson... in an unexpected place.

"But I'm rich and famous," Jefferson said as they sat in his big-ass mansion. "Turns out I'm an amazing actor, good enough to impersonate my quasi-doppleganger who wanted to go find himself at some monastery in Tibet."

"Well, that's great," said Emma, "but we've got a four hour window to get home or you'll be stuck here doing Captain America movies until your balls sag if that guy my quasi-doppleganger used to afternoon bootycall falls off Mt. Everest."

"That's Nepal. And I technically banged her one time when she was lonely and in LA and backslid."

"Not cool, man!" scolded Neal.

"I am slightly insane from mercury poisoning," explained Jefferson. "I go to therapy with Jeremy Piven for it."

"Whatever!" shrugged Emma. "You have mercury poisoning, I have syphilis. And you think I paid attention to anything August was yammering on about? Where _is_ he anyway? I completely forgot about him."

"He turned back into a puppet months ago," Snow recalled. "When Dopey got turned into a tree. I forgot to mention it."

"Meh, he screwed me over, the asshole," Emma shrugged. "As soon as we get back, if he's human again and not a kid I'm kicking him in the balls. Also, maybe I'll give him syphilis. Unless he's dead because that Blue Fairy magic was fake bullshit... No, I'll still kick him in the balls. I deserve to get my closure on that."

"Fair enough," agreed Snow.

"Also, remind me to pick up a shit-ton of penicillin for the syphilis. And also Hook's syphilis before we have an epidemic back home."

"I know a pharmacy that takes fake prescriptions form celebrities," shrugged Jefferson. "And I do miss Grace. Plus, I'll admit, I really don't want to get typecast in a franchise, particularly one owned by Disney. If you think those two TV writer hacks were bad... or even that tyrannical nut job in the bad toupee running for president, they've got nothing on the Earth-2 shadow s

yndicate running The House of Mouse. They're going to remake _Mary Poppins_ and she'll probably take her top off and have supercalifragilisticexpialicoitus with that chimney sweep!"

"Yeah, let's get out of here," said Belle. "I'm afraid to see any more of the live action _Beauty and the Beast_."

"Or more _Frozen_ ," shuddered Robin. "That hasn't even come out yet in the Earth-3 timeline, but did you see all of the children dressed up as Elsa yesterday? It's like a cult!"

"It's part of their master plan," nodded Jefferson. "If you play 'Let It Go' backwards..."

* * *

While the people of Earth-1 woke to tragic news that rocked Hollywood, the fairy tale folk of Earth-3's Enchanted Forest could finally live happily ever after... or go back to being historically dead, their souls no longer in existential torment.

Old grudges remained, but were more about posturing than real animosity. Hook still threatened to kill Rumpelstiltskin when Snow felt compelled to invited him to Thanksgiving dinner that they celebrated because Emma had always wanted to celebrate it growing up. Hades even agreed to help repentant and innocent souls move on and Zelena agreed to leave Oz to Dorothy if she could live with a heart-beating Hades and make The Underworld look however she wanted... which was currently Las Vegas, and which the dead seemed to enjoy a lot more than Underbrooke.

Snow and Charming finally had a real second royal brat of their own rather than the occasional figment of their imaginations that was 'Baby Neal' and named him Anthony, because they didn't know anyone named Anthony.

Emma and Neal never did get married, because Emma refused to endure the big to-do her mother would make of such an event, but they lived happily ever in sin after and a year after Prince Tony was born welcomed identical twin girls, neither of which was evil despite Rumpelstiltskin's insistence they had to remain vigilant.

Rumpelstiltskin and Belle never had children. To be honest, Belle didn't especially like them and the former Dark One - which was a whole story that had nothing to do with Excalibur - had no interest in raising another child at his age, but they were happy to baby-sit when not traveling magical realms to ensure the next generation actually read a book or two.

Regina ended up moving in with Maleficent after Lily ran off wit Dorothy to Oz and even though Henry would call the blonde woman "Mom's friend Mal" they all knew those two were lovers.

Robin and Marian returned to Sherwood Forest and occasionally, along with Cinderella, visited Will and Anastasia in Wonderland which Jefferson had vowed never to visit again, and no one could blame him. He started an acting troupe.

Red and Tinkerbell headed up a movement to get equality between species along with Grumpy and Nova who were no longer kept apart by The Evil Ones' bad writing.

Henry did kiss Violet again, but only to make Grace jealous because of bad advice he took from Charming and Hook. Henry and Grace eventually eloped to Earth-3's less magical realm, rescued The Bug from the charred magical fallout pit that was once Storybrooke and drove around America, though they didn't rob and convenience stores and did return home when Grace was nine months pregnant, leading to Emma having a mini mid-life crisis that she was a grandmother at 40.

* * *

Back on Earth-1, _Once Upon A Time_ was all but forgotten, having been before its sixth season after the tragic events of Comic-Con. Its tweenage fangirls with their ADHD attention spans turned their 'belief' to other shows, movies, and ships and then grew up and took out restraining orders on their bad boy boyfriends after they realized the hard way that assholes don't reform into emo softies because of the magic of kisses.

By the time Emma was enduring being called 'Granny Swan' the show and its showrunners were mentioned only in passing, lore about that tragic night dbeated by conspiracy theorists. Was it a hit taken out by the CIA to stop a plot by The Illuminati... or it was a hit by The Illuminati to stop the Crab People from taking over the world after their operatives assumed the identities of the two former _Lost_ writers whose show went so inexplicably to shit after the first season? No one could really agree on that or if the Crab People had also infiltrated the _Sleepy Hollow_ production team. Truthfully, after the election of President Donald Trump, the last thing anyone gave a shit about was a stupid TV show about fairy tale characters.

* * *

AN: Pretty screwy, huh? Just an extended brain fart the originated as a dream last night after falling asleep way too late after far too strong a cup of coffee well passed the time I should have been drinking one!


	2. epilogue

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**

* * *

Epilogue

It was a dark and chilly night on a frozen road about ten miles outside of Fargo, Minnesota... or maybe it was Laverne? Perhaps they ought to turn around...

The bespeckled college kid in the passenger seat fumbled with the map while his roommate, a slightly hefty kid with the same dark hair who probably also should have been wearing glasses, squinted up ahead on the highway...

While in a parallel universe, two young men identical to the first pair were also speeding down the same icy highway in the other direction when suddenly in theA middle of the road the headlights illuminated a blond teenage girl.

They screamed.

She screamed.

And suddenly there was a burst of blue light and the girl was gone, replaced by an identical car heading right for them!

Both cars swerved, one left, one right.

One ended up in a snowy ditch, the other flew over an embankment and skidded onto an iced over lake...

"Holy shit!" the two young men gasped and scrambled out of their car, fumbling and stumbling their way back onto the highway and toward the other car, it's horn screaming.

Neither of them expected to find inside two men who looked exactly like them! It took a bit of effort to break the windows, not that it mattered. Neither was wearing seatbelts, both were clearly dead.

As the ice began to crack a mutual decision was made. Wallets were quickly snatched up, a bag with term papers taken, and then they scrambled back onto the highway and watched their dopplegangers sink into the icy lake.

Back in their own car, a car from another world, just like them, the two men stuffed the term papers into a bag with strange maps that marked magical anomalies, one with "Stroybrooke" scribbled in red ink.

Their days moonlighting as paranormal investigators had ended and they'd go back to Plan A of becoming TV writers and doing their best to forget this tragic series of events, while unbenounced to them, two more men who looked exactly like them were being locked up on a _third Earth_ for being criminally insane.

And one day those two men would escape and the abandoned trail of magic-hunting breadcrumbs would lead these evil twins to this world, and when they did, the two unintentional realm jumpers would be the ones replaced.


End file.
